Missing players: Phonology and the past-tense debate

Abstract

The proposition that the mental lexicon is a ‘dual route’ system, advanced by Pinker and others to account for regular and irregular morphology, overlooks the important fact that morphological regularity correlates inversely with phonological regularity — ‘regular’ past-tense beeped being phonologically irregular (exceptional syllable), while ‘irregular’ past-tense kept is phonologically just regular. I argue that the correlation, which is general, can only be captured under a single — rather than ‘dual’ — architecture, and an associational — rather than rule based — theory of morphology. Where word-to-word associations are strong, morphology looks regular and phonological alternations are inhibited, making phonology look irregular. In a system in which regularities are attributed to ‘rules’, rules should be able to coexist with other rules, and morphological and phonological regularities should correlate directly, rather than inversely.